News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement is a clear, concise, and foreboding analysis of the local news industry in the United States. Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless, using an impressive set of original data, walk the reader through the decline of local newspapers and newsrooms, the effects that vanishing coverage has on communities, and some experimentally supported proposals to rescue the industry. Among its many positive traits, this book should serve as an example for scholars attempting to synthesize complex literatures and empirical results for broad audiences.

News Hole is at its best when describing what consumers want from local news, the newspaper industry broadly, and its decimation over the past few decades. The vivid descriptions of shrinking newsrooms and subsequent cuts to local coverage (chaps. 2 and 3), and their implications for representation and government accountability (chaps. 4 and 5) will inform policy debates and motivate scores of articles and dissertations. The focus on the “hollowing out” of newspapers (p. 8), rather than simply their disappearance, raises a variety of interesting questions: What types of cuts do newspapers make when facing vanishing budgets? Which levels of government receive the least scrutiny after these cuts? What does it mean for the human capital in journalism? What reforms might bolster the failing industry? A book that generates so much curiosity in a reader will surely find its place on syllabi across subfields in political science and communication studies.

Although the authors begin to tackle many of these questions using newly collected data, novel measurements, and creative tests, a theoretical puzzle persists throughout the book: the dynamic role of supply and demand in the decline of local news. News Hole brings this challenge to the forefront early, noting on p. 6 that “audience demand may be part of the problem, but so is dwindling supply of information.” This complication is a common theme in the study of media and politics broadly, and more recently in research on the political economy of local news. In News Hole, Hayes and Lawless focus primarily on the supply-side mechanism: when, where, and how local newspapers cut their resources devoted to local news.

To be sure, this is an important area of study. Documenting what parts of the country have seen the largest drops in newsroom size, which types of cities see the least amount of local politics coverage, and where citizens, as a result, have the least knowledge of politics are stylized facts hitherto under-researched in this literature. Where the reader is left wanting more, however, is in understanding whether these industry-wide declines are conditioned by shrinking audience demand or something broader in the industry. The authors are careful to point out that these explanations are surely intertwined, but a few research designs remained untapped in attempting to disentangle these mechanisms, explore potential heterogeneities, and, ultimately, inform debates on salvaging the industry.

In particular, the impressive data collection and measurement effort—indeed, the idea of a “news hole” measurement strategy, finding the proportion of all content devoted to local news, is particularly creative—might have been leveraged to a greater degree in relation to both coverage of elections and how it affected election turnout. For the former, the authors show that all levels of local government saw diminished coverage, with school boards subject to, roughly, a 35% relative decrease in their sample. For the latter, the authors analyze the correlation between newspaper coverage of local politics and turnout in mayoral and House of Representative elections. They consistently find that less local coverage predicts lower turnout in these elections.

An extension of these analyses might have interrogated the supply-and-demand mechanisms, teasing apart which was the most important in a given market or election. For instance, a well-established finding in much of this literature is that the type of content in a location’s newspaper correlates highly with consumer demand for that content (e.g., Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers,” Econometrica, 2010). Additionally, consumer demand fell during the period of this study for local politics (Daniel J. Hopkins, The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized, 2018). This decrease in interest in local politics was occurring simultaneously with changes to local politics, which may also have resulted in decreasing turnout for local elections. Combined with the idea that newspaper content matches consumer preferences, the relationship between turnout and local news coverage that the authors find may simply be a product of a lack of interest in local politics, a confounder producing both less local politics coverage and lower turnout. Examining potential shocks to local politics and the local news environment, as well as exploiting the richness of the content data, is a fruitful area for future study implied by this analysis. When newspapers made large cuts to their reporting resources between elections, perhaps driven by an economic shock or buyout by venture capital, did turnout drop for the next election?

This book raises another important question worthy of further attention: If local news decline is supply driven, demand driven, or both (or, instead, depending on how much of it is demand driven versus supply driven), are consumers going to other types of reporting coverage for the content they used to gain from newspapers ? Local TV seems the most likely source for those who still want local news to seek it out. Although Hayes and Lawless suggest it is unlikely that local TV is adequate to fill this void, it remains one of the most trusted sources of news for local viewers. An examination of the heterogeneity in decline in local newspapers, conditional on the local TV environment and availability of other sources, is another promising area for future research with clear policy implications.

Although this book does not solve the supply versus demand puzzle—and it certainly does not claim to—it does elucidate the contours of this debate. It demonstrates, quite convincingly, that the supply-side decreases in coverage correlate with political knowledge and participation. It demonstrates beyond any doubt—through a series of devastating interviews with journalists spread throughout the book—that human capital, the supply side of news production, is draining toward a historical nadir.

In a unique experimental approach (chap. 6), the authors also demonstrate the potential to stimulate demand by encouraging consumers to think about the importance of local government. A question the reader is left wondering about, however, is whether people will pay for their news. A common refrain for saving local news is to adopt the nonprofit model, allowing newspapers to rid themselves of the constraint of rewarding increasingly hungry investor-buyers; indeed, this seems to have successfully been done in some settings; see The Salt Lake Tribune. Nonprofits, however, must still support themselves, and there is limited evidence that, regardless of what consumers say, they are willing to put money on the table.

Ultimately, the minor critiques raised in this review are those of omission—not error—and based on curiosity stimulated by the fascinating, well-written, and important narrative of the book. The many questions that this book raises demonstrate the overwhelming strengths of the work: the building of a scaffolding for the next generation of political science research on local news and the changing media environment in the United States and elsewhere.